Jessie leaps through the air wildly, her long hair flying. The fingers on her left hand twiddle on the frets like hyperactive children on seesaws. Her right hand slams the air over and over—a vicious strum. To accompany, I leap up, crashing my air sticks against air drums and cymbals as if to match her noise level. We contort our lips like angry monkeys. We flash our teeth. Jessie breaks into her Hendrix, smashing her air guitar until it screeches through the invisible amp and breaks into pieces. I beat the drums to a pulp, rip out the skins, snap the sticks. Jessie, not to be outdone, twirls twice like a ballerina or a spinning top and brings her air guitar down on my head. As I fall back, she pounces, tearing apart whatever is between us, and both of us moan in harmony without even touching.

Jeff Friedman

(born 1950) is an American poet and educator known for his lyrical narrative verse and his fabulist prose poetry and flash fiction. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry and/or prose, including most recently Broken Signals (forthcoming from Bamboo Dart Press, 2024), Ashes in Paradise (MadHat Press, 2023), The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University, 2020), Floating Tales (Plume Editions/MadHat Press, 2017), and Pretenders (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). Friedman’s fabulist microfiction collection co-written with Meg Pokrass, The House of Grana Padano, was published by Pelekinesis in April 2022.

His poems, mini stories, and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Fiction International, Hotel Amerika, New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, and Poetry International; in the anthologies A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on Their Prose Poetry (Mad Hat Press, 2019); Best Microfiction (Pelekinesis, 2023, 2022, and 2021); Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (MadHat Press, 2023); and Flash Fiction Funny: 82 Very Short Humorous Stores (Blue Light Press, 2013); and in numerous other literary magazines and anthologies.

Dzvinia Orlowsky’s and Friedman’s translation of Memorials by Polish poet Mieczyslaw Jastrun was published by Lavender Ink/Dialogos in August 2014. Nati Zohar’s and Friedman’s book of translations, Two Gardens: Modern Hebrew Poems of the Bible, was published by Singing Bone Press in 2016.

Friedman has received numerous awards and prizes, including a National Endowment Literature Translation Fellowship in 2016 (with Dzvinia Orlowsky) and two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council. He taught creative writing at Keene State College for many years and was awarded both the Excellence in Teaching award and the Teaching-Performance Award. He now teaches private workshops, and lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with artist Colleen Randall and their dog, Ruby.

Author’s website: https://poetjefffriedman.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Three Micro Stories by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman in Issue 9 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2021): “The Grana Padano House of Wedgewood”; “The Not So Invisible Ex”; and “Mistaking One Cheese for Another”

⚡ Father and Son and Ram in the Thicket, prose poems by Friedman in MacQ-9 (August 2021)